What is HTML5?

HTML5 is one of the new buzz words that is popping into many conversations of late. In this blog post we will delve into where it came from and where it is going to. 


HTML4 has been around a very long time, 16 years to be exact. That is an extremely long time for one specification to still be in existence and still be widely used. There are limitations and short comings in HTML4 for which developers have been creating plasters to cover the holes for many years.

In 2004, W3C decided it was time to create XHTML 2.0 and address some of the issues it had. Some of the decisions made did not sit well with some of the participants in the W3C and so they broke away from the W3C and created WHATWG (Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group), in order to evolve HTML and HTML forms

After years of ignoring each other and working independently of each other, the two groups got it together and joined forces, calling themselves W3C HTML Working Group and so were born a set of standards we now call HTML5.

For the past 8 years, W3C HTML Working Group has been developing HTML5, the 5th version of HTML. HTML5 builds on the ‘uber’ successful HTML4 and adds extra functionality and features that will aid developers and amaze users. It has greatly improved the language and gives far better support for multimedia and server communications.

Since HTML5 is built on HTML4, there is no massive learning curve when developing with it. Everything that worked in HTML4 will still work in HTML5; therefore there is no need for recoding or relearning for the developer.

Likewise with the users, if they are accessing a site that has used HTML5 features but are viewing it in a browser that doesn’t support the features, the majority of the page will load albeit without some of the new features, they will be replaced by an alternative element. Some features in HTML5 have a backwards compatibility feature which will allow newer features to revert to older formats and be displayed. If a website had an email input box, which is a new feature for HTML, it will be shown as a simple text box if the user is using an incompatible browser. Therefore the user should not see any difference in visiting sites that have incorporated HTML5’s newer features.

Included in the new specifications are numerous new <tags> like <video> & <audio> which make embedding video and audio files into a site far easier in a hope to standardize the practise. There are dozens of new input types like search, email, tel, color, URL to name just a few. These will greatly improve the input the user inserts in an input field. For example if the site requested an email address, the developer would use the email input field to acquire this information from the user instead of the old format of input box. When the user clicks on the box and inputs their email address, it is validated by the browser for the developer. This means the user will be unable to enter an email address that is not in the proper email format. Also if the user had been using a phone to input the email address, since the browser knows that an email address is required, the phone’s keyboard would change to make the @ symbol and space bar more accessible to the user.
There are many other fascinating improvements to HTML like Web Workers, Offline Web Applications, GeoLocation, Tweaks to existing Forms, Form Autofocus, Microdata, History API,  and of course Web Storage.

Web Storage, which is client-side data storage, was part of the original specification but has now been removed to be a specification of its own, partially due to the size of the spec and partially for political reasons...

Ref:
Pilgrim, M. (2011). Dive Into HTML5. Available: http://diveintohtml5.info/past.html. Last accessed 20/1/2014